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Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Scott LeBrun (Hey_Sweden)5 / 10

Admittedly, not very good, but not all that bad either.

A king cobra being transported by train to a carnival supposedly
becomes the resting place for Satan himself. And in this form, Satan
has the ability to command other slithering reptiles to do his bidding.
This company of snakes arrives in a small town to disrupt the lives of
the locals, among them irreverent priest Father Tom Farrow (Fritz
Weaver, "Creepshow"), dedicated doctor Maggie Sheridan (Gretchen
Corbett, "Let's Scare Jessica to Death", 'The Rockford Files'), and
herpetologist Paul Hendricks (Jon Korkes, "Syngenor").

"Jaws of Satan" certainly wears its influences right on its sleeve,
including the naming of the Hendricks character. It plays like a cross
between "Jaws" and "The Exorcist", except without the level of
craftsmanship in those two classics. It's directed in very workmanlike
fashion by TV veteran Bob Claver, in what appears to be his only
feature film. The shocks aren't anything special, nor are the suspense
scenes, but at least the animal action is well executed. If this low
budget production at least *looks* very good, that's due to the
contributions of the great cinematographer Dean Cundey and camera
operator Raymond Stella, two guys who did some of their best work for
the director John Carpenter. The music score by Roger Kellaway
("Evilspeak", "Silent Scream") is quite good, and the movie does have
an atmospheric opening. The similarity to "Jaws" itself is quite
obvious in the way that the mayor (Jack Gordon) and businessman Matt
Perry (Bob Hannah) don't want public fears about snakes to interfere
with the operation of their brand spanking new dog racing track.

Some of the supporting cast is rather nondescript, but things are held
together by a highly engaging Weaver. Diana Douglas, whose son Joel was
the production manager, co-stars as the doom sayer Evelyn Downs. A very
young Christina Applegate makes her film debut here, playing the
daughter of her real-life mom Nancy Priddy's character.

This viewer found "Jaws of Satan" agreeable enough. It's not a great
movie, or even a good one, really, but it's passable schlock for lovers
of Animal Attack cinema.

Five out of 10.

Reviewed by TOMASBBloodhound2 / 10

Truly inept. One of the worst.

Aside from being Christina Applegate's debut, there is really nothing
notable about this failed attempt at combining religious hokum with
animal life on the attack. Fritz Weaver guts it out and turns in a
decent performance as a small town priest whose ancestors are
responsible for a curse being brought upon his parish. It seems that
hundreds of years prior, his ancestor stamped out a druid cult and now
their spirit is reborn in the form of a king cobra! And this king cobra
happens to have jumped off a circus train after killing the crew just
as it passes through this small Alabama town!!! YES You heard that
right!! Now, the cobra casts its spell on other snakes in the area and
causes them to randomly attack anyone they encounter! All this while a
new dog racing track is about to open. And the mayor and the guy
building it of course won't let anything delay the grand opening! No
matter how many people get bitten! It's up to the priest to re-discover
his faith and drive out the evil snakes!!! As you can tell from the
above paragraph, this film is laughable. At least Snakes On a Plane
apparently knew not to take itself seriously. (I've never seen that
one, but that's what I understand) But Jaws of Satan plays it straight
and only generates unintentional laughs! So many goofs! Plexiglass
between the snakes and cast members is clearly visible in some scenes.
In one scene, the sheriff is called to stalk a dangerous snake in a
hardware store. The snake is clearly just a harmless gopher snake, but
they try to make it seem like its attacking him!! We hear a gunshot,
even when he clearly did not fire the pistol. Then, the snake just kind
of slumps onto the floor... clearly not dead or harmed! The music is
absolutely wretched, the film is filled with padding like people
driving or taxiing down a runway in a little plane. Thought I was
watching R.O.T.O.R. for a moment with all that padding! Lots of ancient
clichés abound. We get a morgue attendant who leaves food lying around
dead bodies and acts casual while eating next to corpses. Seen that one
in so many others.... We see an expert brought in from out of town, but
he doesn't amount to anything. Just serves as a love interest for a
female town doctor. I don't know where to stop with my criticism, so
I'll just do it here. Awful film! 2 of 10 stars.

This movie has a very specific audience

SPOILERS.

I don't really know how it's possible to "spoil" this movie or two give
two figs about it.

Let me see. The plot. Okay. A rash of odd and lethal snakebites begins
turning up in a small town, much to the puzzlement of the doctor played
by Gretchen Corbett, looking mighty slim and much cuter than my doctor.
Nobody else seems particularly bothered though, despite the fact that
all the deciduous trees are bare and all good snakes should be
comfortably hibernating. Never mind, though. The priest (Fritz Weaver)
is losing his faith or his confidence or something. He boozes it up and
doesn't seem to be having a lot of fun. No joke to be unpopular in a
small town. Maybe it's partly because, although he seems to be Catholic
in that he lapses into Latin at a critical point, he says the mass
facing in the wrong direction. At any rate his ontological Angst seems
to have drawn Satan to his little town, with Weaver as the bullseye.
The original snake, a cobra, arrives by train. (Don't ask.)

That's the Exorcist part of it. The Jaws part has to do with one of
those money-mongering venture capitalists who wants to open a
dog-racing track and doesn't want to alarm any visitors with all this
talk about crazy snakes. How dumb can you get? He could have solved the
entire problem simply by opening a mongoose-racing track.

Oh, there's one of those expert academicians drawn in from the outside
to provide us with herpetological knowledge that the other characters
(and the audience) don't have. He really doesn't add much, in the way
of herpetological expertise, plot development, or character. He's only
needed once, to rush in and save Corbett from a beautiful specimen of
the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus adamanteus.

I know. The snake seems to have changed from a cobra to a rattlesnake.
This happens to be a rather wise rattlesnake, having followed Corbett
into the shower and peeked at her, but it's a rattlesnake nonetheless.
But then there are a LOT of different kinds of snakes used here. The,
um, "king cobra" seems to have roused all of them. I spotted a common
and harmless gopher snake among the mess. The herpetologist's curiosity
isn't aroused by the presence of cobras, native to Asia and Africa, in
a small American town, or what an Eastern diamondback is doing so far
out of its range in the southeast US. At least one of the snakes is
visibly killed on camera, which is pretty rotten if you ask me. The
target should have been the screenwriters.

But the plot is so full of holes that it's not really worth going into.
Speaking of holes, the cobra accosts the priest in a graveyard and
while he's trying to run away he falls into an empty freshly dug grave
and can't get out. The cobra, it seems, has this thing about
crucifixes. What would have happened to Weaver if he'd been a rabbi and
pulled a Mogen David we can only speculate about.

At one point, Corbett, wearing a neat red dress, is lying down in a
cave full of snakes presided over by the Satanic Elapid. I don't know
how she wound up on this rock altar. It's done offscreen. The priest
shows up, waving his cross, removes the supine Corbett, which is a pity
because she really looked very sacrificial, lies down in her place
wearing a surplice, kisses his cross, encants some Latin mumbo jumbo,
and the snake disappears in a pillar of flame.

If he'd have done that at the beginning he could have saved all of us
an hour. Oh, by the way, the little girl -- there always has to be a
kid to naive to recognize danger signals -- is played by Christina
Applegate.